Oren Paynton

⭐ does not mean ♥

[Tomer Persico @TomerPersico]

The place Israel occupies in these people's imagination is ridiculous. Israel as the linchpin of colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, ecological devastation - whatever bugs you most, Israel does it worst. Get rid of Israel, save the entire world.

It is much bigger than Rooney. Over the last few years, artists, activists, and academics have repeatedly advanced versions of the same claim: Israel as humanity’s arch-nemesis, the disappearance would somehow solve everything.

Example: Jason Hickel, visiting professor at the London School of Economics, claimed that “A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis.” Because why not.

Israel has become a western totem, personifying the cumulative sins of the West’s entire history. In an incredible historical irony, the Jews are now not an oriental, semitic pariah nation nor a degenerate sub-human race, but the purest representatives of the West and the most atrocious white supremacists.

As the West’s original essence Israel naturally carries the West’s original sins: colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, etc. Because the Jews are now considered the very essence of the West, Israel's sins are understood as the carrying the collective blame of all westerners. Making Israel pay is thus not only a step on the long arch towards justice, but serves as a purgative practice for all westerners.

As the effigy of the West, burning Israel will cleanse the West from its past transgressions. The wish to eradicate Israel is therapeutic, salvific: the sins of all western forefathers, those imperialist, colonialist, slave-holding Europeans, will finally be atoned. Capitalism will fall, the environment will be saved. Redemption is nigh, we just have to eradicate that wart of a nation.

As the eternal alter-ego of the West, Jews will always function as its scapegoats. When the West loved itself, we were the alien element supposedly defiling it. Now that the West despises itself, we have become its distilled essence: the figure through whose destruction it fantasizes about purification.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Your reminder that the Labour government decided to restore taxpayers’ money to an organisation infested with terrorists.

[Johnny Midnight ⚡️ @its_The_Dr]

British Humor, tries to buy a train ticket! 🤣

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

This is inversion so callous it's hard to believe.

The Holocaust had a survival rate of about 30%. Millions of people disappeared from European cities and towns over several years. Everybody knew because it was happening all around them.

Gaza has a survival rate, despite the worst and most deadly and horrible periods of the war, of 97%.

All the dead Jews were noncombatants. A large percentage of the dead Gazans were combatants.

And the Jews of Europe, even as their millennia-old civilization was being systematically wiped out, wanted nothing from the societies that surrounded them except to be allowed to live in peace.

Gaza's leadership of religious fanatics, meanwhile, wants every last Israeli dead and gone, is willing to fight to the last Gazan to achieve that aim, has said so publicly and worked for decades to blow up every peace attempt -- and even now believes that Gaza's destruction would be a worthwhile sacrifice to lay on the altar of Israel's destruction, because their god told them so.

So Israelis can reasonably believe, given those features of the Gaza war that aren't true about any genocide ever, and were pretty much the opposite of what was happening in the Holocaust, that Gaza's suffering is a bad and painful war, but not remotely a genocide.

But the point of it all, of course, is not to analyze Gaza, but specifically to lump it together with the Holocaust -- to cast the Jews as the new Nazis.

The only reason this person would dare to make such an insanely ahistorical and immoral parallel is because this is the heart of the bigoted propaganda campaign in which he enthusiastically participates: The point of it all is to make the Jews into the Nazis.

A culture that obsessed about Jews being evil and was then shocked by the Holocaust into obsessing about dead Jews as the apotheosis of righteous victimhood is now obsessively engaged in knocking Jews off that moral pedestal they themselves put them on.

That's why they don't care one whit about Hamas massacres of Gazans, about genocidal wars in Syria or Yemen (even when they've funded and armed the sides), about flotilla activists currently held by the Libyans...literally nothing triggers a response except Jews.

They still, even after all these generations, no matter what else is happening in the world or in their own societies, can't stop thinking about Jews.

And as we Jews learned in the 1940s -- the actual, historical 1940s, not the weird fantasies conjured up by these bigots -- a whole society can be in the grip of a callous, destructive bigotry and still believe it is true and righteous.

[BURKOV @burkov]

I think the biggest issue here is that we don't really know how to differentiate words from ideas, because we, humans, can only exchange ideas through words.

So, when an LLM generates words and a human generates words, and those are hard to tell from one another, how can we be sure that the LLM and the human aren't equivalent?

While knowing the math of LLMs helps to intuitively not equate the two, the experience with real humans also makes some (including myself) believe that the processes leading to words in many humans' heads look more like shallow pattern matching than deep understanding and thinking.

Not all humans are shallow pattern matchers, while all LLMs are, and this is what really differs them. But should we compare LLMs to *all* humans, or to the *majority* of them? If the majority is OK as the objective, then LLMs and a typical human might as well be both shallow pattern matchers.

[dan linnaeus @DanLinnaeus]

They accuse Israel of all the things they want to justify doing to Israel and the Jewish community. It’s the same playbook used by Islamists and Nazis in the 30s: stoke hatred through lies and distortions till it spills over into the streets and erupts in violence. This has a name in genocide studies: accusation in a mirror.

Capturing institutions to legitimate this inversion is key for the strategy to work. In the Rwandan genocide Hutu Power media accused Tutsis of planning the extermination the Hutu leadership was itself preparing. The accusation was deliberately designed as a license to exterminate Tutsis.

So who are they today? A convergence of Islamic fundamentalists opportunistically amplified and instrumentalized by Russia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, China and North Korea through anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Western narratives that often traffic in outright dehumanization and hatred.

Why? To counter the West. Yes, it’s a complex tangled web of interests and influence operations, but no, it is not actually complicated. The Jewish community is an easy target, demographically only fifteen and a half million globally, with 7.2 million Jewish Israelis — they are easy to overwhelm and saturate with lies:

The High Level Military Group of former Nato and Western generals submitted an Amicus brief to the International Criminal Court saying they had visited the theater of operations in Gaza and interviewed commanders and soldiers. They found that the precautionary measures the Israel defense forces took set new standards that they believe western militaries are not in a place to meet.

The Chair of Urban Warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point has embedded five times with the IDF since October 7 and issued his findings publicly that the IDF goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid excessive harm to uninvolved civilians. He saw missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby, and Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.

Numerous high-information findings such as these have been buried in the media and overrun by hostile information saturation. Western democracies are vulnerable to these cognitive warfare strategies aimed at effecting alliance and sociopolitical fractures because of free speech and civil rights laws.

Shadow financing networks fund captured or sham non government organizations and political committees across the West, many of them working in alignment with Ikhwanist streams via Qatar and Turkey, Deobandi networks via Pakistan and their transnational Islamist networks.

There may be no conspiracy in the strict analytical sense of coordination and direction at the behest of a group of people, or we may yet uncover deeper layers that indicate just that. Either way the net effect is the same.

These state scale influence operations are stoking hatred as an institutional strategy, sometimes under the veneer of pseudo sophisticated think tank and research output, often amplified through inorganic ‘Grass Roots’ activism and protest movements, and all of it amplified through captured media operations and social media influence networks.

The result is the most intense wave of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment witnessed since the pre-holocaust era. What this portends has historically spelt disaster for much more than the Jewish people.

This is not something that will stop organically. It is also not something that will simply consistently intensify. Rather, these things tend to ebb and flow organically with inorganic amplification campaigns over the course of years before an opportunistic event tips the scale and information war sparks urban anarchy where innocent blood is spilled.

History is littered with warnings. Ignoring them is not an option if we wish to avoid the dark consequences that attach to these historical patterns.

[Oren Paynton @paynton]

@muhammadshehad2 Israel gov blacklisted Euro Med back in 2015 - over 10 years ago! So nothing to do with current war and everything to do with Euro Med being closely affiliated to Hamas.

[Rawan Osman روان عثمان @RawaneOsmane]

“Free Palestine.”

I grew up on those words.

In Lebanon, most people around me wanted a free Palestine for a very practical reason — to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited in no small part by the Palestinian armed factions who turned Lebanon into their launching pad. “Free Palestine” meant: free us from them.

In Damascus, where my father’s family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine must be returned to the Arabs, its righteous owners. No one asked follow-up questions. No one was expected to.

Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslim, therefore supporting the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A non-brainer in the most literal sense — no brain engaged at all.

Nobody stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. Nobody found it strange that Jerusalem, the supposedly third holiest city in Islam, is not mentioned once in the Quran. Not once. Nor is Palestine. The entire theological and political architecture of this cause rests on a foundation that their own scripture doesn’t bother to acknowledge.

What was actually happening was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty — and frankly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis — the Arab world has been remarkably consistent in how it treats people who are different. We just don’t talk about that.

Instead, in the West, we talk about Palestine.

In the West, a civilization that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, Palestinians cut the line every time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for campaigning for the right to drive — a right they were denied until 2018 — girls sold into marriage in Afghanistan, women erased from public life entirely under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents ground into dust in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in Libya, children starving in Yemen while their rulers wage proxy wars, entire populations hollowed out by hunger in Sudan? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from Iraq and Syria, the Arab world methodically emptied of every Jewish community it once held — a demographic erasure carried out across a century with surgical patience and near-total Western silence?

Palestine is still first.

So let’s end where we started. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, exactly? The Roman invention? The British administrative line? The British Mandate covered the entire territory of what is today Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. In 1921, 78% of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family — a dynasty imported from Hijaz in present-day Saudi Arabia — and became the Kingdom of Jordan, which it remains to this day. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historic Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. Nobody protests that. No flags, no chants, no encampments. The remaining 22% was designated for the Jews, became Israel, and is the only part that any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with.

So when you say Free Palestine, you mean that 22%. You mean the Jews.

And free it from whom? From a people with a three-thousand-year-old documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name coined by Roman colonizers, a name lifted from the Torah, a name that has no roots in Arabic, no mention in the Quran, and no history as a sovereign state?

You are not chanting for liberation. You are chanting for colonialism — the Roman kind, repackaged for social media.

Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, coined by invaders, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position.

📍#Israel

[Aɴᴛ @AntSpeaks]

David Attenborough narrates the Gaza Flotilla activists getting absolutely humbled at a Spanish airport ✈️🦍🇪🇸

Entitled rodents meet Spanish security mammals.

Nature is healing.

Enjoy the documentary. 📺

[svxpr @svxpr]

@Airaxora can't drink coffee if you're dead

[Eran Efrat @Eran_Efrat]

תתארו לכם סיטואציה שמשתתפי המשט היו נלכדים, מועברים אחר כבוד לאיזה בור מסריח עם חצי תפוח ועוגיית עבאדי וממתינים שהמדינות שלהם יממנו להם טיסה חזור.
בלי סרטוני יח״צ.
מישהו חושב שהסרטון של בן גביר מרתיע מישהו מלעשות משט נוסף? אני בספק.
מה שאנשים לא מצליחים לתפוס היא העובדה שראשי המדינות האירופאיות הם בכלל לא הבעיה- הם לא מעניינים אף אחד.
הבעיה היא השכן ההולנדי, או הפיני, או הבלגי.
או הלקוח הגרמני, האיטלקי או הצרפתי.
או חברת הנדל״ן הקפריסאית איתה יש עסקים או צוות המלון בכרתים שיודעים שאתם ישראלים.
הם רואים את זה.
זה מוגש להם על מגש של כסף משלל אנשים שרק מחכים לבשל מטעמי שנאה.
זה לא פוגע ביחסי מדינות- זה פוגע ביחסים ברמה היום יומית של האדם הקטן.
מעניין לי את הישבן מה חושבת מלוני או ראש ממשלת ספרד, הם יכולים לקפוץ לי.
מעניין אותי מה חושב הלקוח שקונה סחורה ישראלית, או שכן של ישראלי בבריסל או חברים של ישראלים במדריד, או החברים לספסל הלימודים של הילדים.
וכל זה בשביל סרטון יח״צ מפגר עם 0 תועלת פרט לפגיעה אנושה בחיי היום יום של האנשים הפשוטים. לא בחיים של מנהיגי המדינות האירופאיות, אלא בחיים של הסטודנט הישראלי בסורבון או בפוליטקניקו, או של הסטודנטית לרפואה בהונגריה, או של הסוחר הישראלי שמוכר את הסחורה שלו לאירופה.
האנשים הקטנים. אלו שממילא שורדים בקושי אחרי ה-7/10 עם דעת הקהל הרעילה.
כן אני יודע, לא אכפת לכם.
זה ישראל נגד העולם.
רק בפעם הבאה אל תיללו פה כי זרקו אתכם מאיזה מסעדה או מלון.
יש כבר מדורה. אין צורך לשפוך בנזין.

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

אני רוצה לשתף אתכם במאחורי הקלעים של עולם ההסברה.

מאז שהתפוטרתי ממערך ההסברה (הרקע הפוליטי כבר ידוע לכולם) אני מנהל מיזם חברתי שנלחם על שמה הטוב של ישראל בתקשורת העולמית. ה״דוברות האזרחית״ נשענת על עשרות אזרחים מוכשרים שמנדבים את זמנם להתראיין בחו״ל, תורמים פרטיים, ואולי הכי חשוב - רכבת אווירית של יהודים צעירים מהתפוצות שבאים להתנדב. הם רואים את השנאה בעולם, יודעים כמה היא לא מוצדקת ומסכנת את חיינו, ובאים לנסות להציל אותנו.

היום בקבוצה של העבודה, קיבלתי את ההודעה הזו מאחת המתמחות שלנו, בחורה מקסימה מארה״ב שעלתה לארץ ממש לאחרונה.

תקראו ותפנימו. האזרחים הנהדרים שקמו ולקחו אחריות בשבעה באוקטובר כשהמדינה קרסה ממשיכים להילחם, בעוד גורמים בממשלת שבעה באוקטובר פוגעים ומחבלים במדינה שלנו בכוונה.

אין פה מה להסביר. באנגלית אומרים שאי אפשר לשים אודם על חזיר, ובתרגום לעברית: אי אפשר להכשיר את השרץ. ופה יש חזיר שמחבל בעם ישראל. מבצע פיגוע מכוון במעמד הבינלאומי שלנו. ובנשמה שלנו. הכל למען תעמולת בחירות.

מה אני צריך לענות לאותה המתמחה שנידבה מאות שעות עבור ההסברה הישראלית, ורואה ששר הבט״פ מרבה שנאה נגד ישראל ובכך מסכן את המשפחה שלה בארה״ב? ומה אני צריך לענות לה בתור עולה חדשה, שהעיניים עוד נוצצות מהחלום הציוני שעוד נבנה פה מדינה מתוקנת ומתורבתת, ארץ יפה וטובה? מה היא צריכה למסור לחברים שלה בארה״ב, היהודים והלא-יהודים כאחד, שרואים את הפוליטיקאי הישראלי הכי מפורסם (אחרי ביבי) תולה שלט ״ברוכים הבאים לישראל״ מעל הזוועה הזאת?

בקרוב תהיה לנו הזדמנות לפתוח דף חדש ולגרש את החרפה הזו לפרק בהיסטוריה שעדיף שנשכח.

[Oren Paynton @paynton]

@keewa Wait till you hear how the UN works…

[Ehud Peri (Friedmann) @ehudperi]

@LVertzhaizer מרגע שהכיפות הסרוחות השתלטו על היום הזה, הם גם מטמאים את דגל הלאום כי בחסותו ובחסות הכיפה והציצית הם עורכים פוגרומים.כמו שבהפגנות נגד ההפיכה המשפטית החזרנו לעצמנו את דגל הלאום, כך גם שם.בשנים הבאות לאחר החלפת השלטון, מצעד הדגלים ויום ירושלים צריכים לחזןר לאנשים מתורבתים ולא לחיות

[Oren Paynton @paynton]

@Palestinia12961 It’s not quite as simple as that. Yes, there are many (most) peaceful and kind Muslims.
However, a vast amount of brutal terrorism worldwide is carried out *in the name* of radical Islam, so there is a problem to solve.

[Oren Paynton @paynton]

@Turloughc @kamilkazani @StockpilingS Yeah.
And the Arabs 200 years ago

[ShAuLi ✊🏼🔥🏳️‍🌈 @Shauli]

כאב אין סופי. 💔😢

ב־7 באוקטובר 2023, בשעה 7:07 בבוקר, התקבלה שיחה במוקד 100 של משטרת ישראל.

על הקו היו שני ילדים מכפר עזה.
מיכאל עידן בן 9 ואחותו עמליה בת 6.

כבר במשפט הראשון שלהם הם אמרו באומץ בלתי נתפס:
“אנחנו ילדים, אבל זה בגלל שההורים שלנו שניהם מתו”.

רגעים קודם לכן אביהם רועי נרצח.
אמם סמדר שכבה לידם ללא רוח חיים.
ואחותם הקטנה אביגיל - בת ה-3 - נחטפה לעזה, והם אפילו לא ידעו מה עלה בגורלה.

הם לבד בממ״ד.
ילדים.

ומיכאל, בקול שקט אך נחוש, מתקשר למוקד 100 ומבקש עזרה.

אבל בצד השני של הקו, המוקדנית לא מבינה.
לא מאמינה.
חושבת שמדובר במתיחה.

שני הילדים הגיבורים האלה מנסים שוב ושוב להסביר:
מחבלים נכנסו לבית.
ההורים שלנו נרצחו.
נשארנו לבד.

זו אולי אחת ההקלטות הקשות ביותר לשמיעה,
אבל גם אחת העדויות החזקות ביותר לגבורה ולתושייה אינסופית של שני ילדים קטנים, בני 6 ו־9.
ילדים שנשארו לבד מול הזוועה.
שנאלצו להפוך למבוגרים ברגע אחד.
שעמדו מול פחד שאף מבוגר לא אמור להכיר.
ושהחזיקו את עצמם כשהעולם שלהם קרס - ובחרו לא לוותר.

לא נשכח לרגע מה קרה שם ומי בדיוק באותן דקות כינס את הסוכנים הקטארים שלו לטכס עצה איך לחמוק מאחריות ולהישאר בשלטון.

לא נשכח ולא נסלח‼️

[ProgrammaticallyIncorrect @SjBarrister]

@Steve_Cooke More racism in the @TheGreenParty

I said on X recently that @ZackPolanski is the Oswald Mosley of our time - trading racism for political power.

I stand by that accusation.

[Oren Paynton @paynton]

Zack Polanski is a dangerous man spouting dangerous rhetoric. He's not the only dangerous person in British politics, but he's certainly up there. There need to be consequences for his behaviour.

[Metropolitan Police @metpoliceuk]

“Apprehending violent and dangerous criminals is a full contact and messy task which may appear shocking to observers with little experience of policing in the real world.”

Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley writes to Zack Polanski.

[Realign For Palestine @rfpalestine]

There was a period when a Palestinian state could have been declared: before 1967, when Gaza was under Egyptian control and the West Bank under Jordanian rule.
There was no Israeli occupation of those territories and no settlements. East Jerusalem was not under Israeli control.
But no Palestinian state emerged.
Later, after 1973, another opening appeared. Egypt pivoted from war to peace. Israel showed it was willing to trade land for recognition.
Again, no Palestinian state.
Why is that?